Tweeters, talkers reveal their stripes

TWITTER users lean to the political left and talkback radio callers to the right, but both form part of the mainstream of opinion, according to a study.

An analysis of political sentiment in Australia by an independent firm compared how views expressed on Twitter and talkback radio moved in comparison with the mainstream, as measured by a conventional national opinion poll, Newspoll.

It found that users of the online social media company Twitter are distinctly better disposed to the Labor leader, Julia Gillard, overall, and talkback callers to the Coalition leader, Tony Abbott.

In the case of Twitter, it also confirmed what has long been remarked of social media: ''It really is antisocial media,'' according to John Chalmers of Sentia Media.

Sentia is the author of the study, the owners of Media Monitors, and the first to make such a comparison.

''Talkback has a reputation for being robust and polarised but Twitter is far more vitriolic and venomous in content.''

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While both avenues allowed anonymity, personal attacks on Twitter were harsher because comment was not moderated, Mr Chalmers said, while talkback callers were vetted by producers and presenters.

Twitter is also more volatile in the aggregate expression of political sentiment, and prone to be what Mr Chalmers described as ''superficial''.

When Ms Gillard stumbled while walking on soft lawn in India, for instance, Twitter users reacted sharply against her, ''in a way that probably doesn't represent voting intentions''.

But while the results show the two media channels nurture opposing political biases overall, they did not support the idea that audiences were fragmenting into separate political universes.

In the US, the conventional wisdom is that media audiences are retreating from the broad community into increasingly narrow, closed, self-selecting political worlds.

But Mr Chalmers said the Sentia analysis found that both streams of opinion, Twitter and talkback, moved with changes in the broader national sentiment.

The study sampled sentiment from July 15 to the end of November, when Labor staged a recovery in national opinion polling.

Sentia found Twitter and talkback ''both reflect the same overall sentiment, to varying degrees'', said Mr Chalmers. ''Both are reasonably sound bellwethers of public sentiment, to a greater or lesser degree.''